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Friday, October 30, 2015

All the Frills: Witchy Women

So for a couple of days Blogger has been acting really strange and every photo I upload it makes blurry and refuses to let me resize (has anyone else experienced this???). So I put off posting for a few days in the hopes it would resolve it but it appears to still being a jerk so apologies for the slightly blurry image. I really hope this resolves itself soon as all my outfit photos are basically unusable with the blurriness level...anyways, on to the actual post!

During my travels in Edinburgh I spent a blissful afternoon at the National Gallery and then, in the gift shop, I purchased an exhibition catalogue of images of witches in European art as a fun read for myself. While reading it I came across this really stunning painting that, as a British historian (granted, of a slightly earlier period) I had never seen before. And it was so captivating that I promptly printed it in colour for my desk at work.

The work, by Daniel Gardner, depicts the extremely influential Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (you may know her from the not-half-bad Keira Knightly movie The Duchess), Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne, and Anne Seymour Damer as the three witches from Macbeth. Only instead of being portrayed as withered and deformed hags (the weird sisters), as the Macbeth witches are described in Shakespeare and typically depicted artistically, they are beautiful and fashionable and the picture itself is just sort of light and charming and yet witchy. Tantalizingly little is known about the picture but it’s entirely out of Garner’s usual style and may have been commissioned by one of the women (Damer, most likely) who were all notorious, influential, politically minded, and somewhat scandalous figures in the eighteenth century.
Anyways, I found it all immensely interesting and wanted to share!

4 comments:

That happened to me once with blogger, ages ago, and it was the beginning of my decision to move to a new platform. I think in the short term I googled what to do and there was a solution, but I can't remember what it was - hopefully things just work themselves out! Happy Halloween!xox,Cee

Oh you kill me with the buzzfeed lists, and it's good to know there is a reason I love cheese so much. Now I need to go eat some, because learning that I'm addicted to it just means I have no more need to excuses.

Also, I'm not sure what to do about the blogger photo upload, other than avoiding it - I use flickr to host my photos.

I've not had that problem, but perhaps instead of saving to JPEG, try saving as .PNG, I usually save images as png. Blogger acts up sometimes, I'm still debating on switching to wordpress, since everyone sears by it. We'll see. Great links as always, and I've always been fascinated by Duchess of Devonshire, Georgina even as a child, although sad in the end. xStyle Files

I had that problem too and it's a big reason I started hosting my own blog. A lot of platforms change the file size so it loads faster, but that reduces the integrity of the image. Facebook does that too. It's super irritating.